We have had some really fine weather here recently and John the bird-ringer has been catching newly-arrived summer visitors in the meadows.

There is also loud chiffchaffing emanating from the hedgerows these days and here is the unassuming bird that is responsible for that:

The blackcap’s song is beautifully melodious. It’s the males that are singing, but here is one of the females that they are trying to impress:

Linnets are partial migrants. Many remain in this country over the winter, forming large flocks on farmland that has some winter food, but a significant number migrate instead to southern France, Spain and Morocco. Either way, lovely linnets have recently arrived back here in the meadows to breed this summer:

John also caught a pair of robins. The first one he ringed was a male but the second, when gently blown upon through a tube, could be seen to have a nearly fully developed brood patch. This indicates that she’s a female and should soon be sitting on eggs. This brood patch has a really good blood supply to keep the eggs warm:

As John was at work with his nets, Dave and I took the dog around the meadows with her ball. We were walking along the northern boundary when I heard a small commotion going on in the hedgerow. I peered in and was flabbergasted to see that it was a water rail, struggling to get itself deeper into the bushes as we passed by.

I did get a good look at it but unfortunately was too stunned to act quickly. I failed to get a photo before the bird worked its way to the bottom of the hedge and out of sight.

Here is a photo of a water rail from Wiki Commons though:

It is thought that around 3,900 pairs of water rails breed in the UK with the numbers boosted in the winter by birds coming from colder parts of Europe. But they are very secretive wetland birds, usually hiding themselves amongst reeds and are difficult to properly count.

I presume that the water rail in our hedgerow this week must be en route back to its breeding grounds in Continental Europe. They are strongly nocturnal when they migrate, so would probably have stayed in the hedge all day and emerged when it got dark to fly across The Channel. I positioned a couple of trial cameras in case it came out onto the grass in front of the hedge before it flew off.

Unfortunately the bird left the hedge that evening without emerging in front of my cameras. I had never in a million years thought that we would have a water rail on the meadows bird list, but there it now is, nestling in at number 103.

An alexander is a tall, thuggish plant, forming dense stands that outcompete native flora and is a real problem here on the East Kent coast.

For the first few years after taking on the meadows, we were naive and insufficiently vigilant, letting alexanders grow and set seed in the meadows in a most foolhardy manner. This photo taken out the front of Walmer Castle this week demonstrates what can happen when you let down your guard in this way:

A thick hedge of the hated plant lines much of the coastal footpath between Walmer and Kingsdown at this time of year:

By the time we woke up to the threat and took it seriously, we already had thousands of alexander plants growing in the meadows. So many, in fact, that it is impossible to dig them all up in one go.

The same cannot be said for the ones that flower deep within the spiky hedgerows though:

The unwanted alexander successfully extricated from the back of the hedgerow:

Our approach for several years now has been to dig up any alexander that starts to flower and, since January, I have been regularly patrolling with my spade. I have removed hundreds of them and, now in mid April, the plants that remain will not be flowering this year. I will continue to be vigilant for a few weeks more, but can tell you now that no alexander will set seed in the meadows for another year. The war is far from over, however, and battle will recommence next January.

It’s wonderful to have the invertebrates out and about again and how I have missed them. This week I have been trying to photograph some flying insects as they feed from flowers.

A bee-fly is a sweet little thing so long as you don’t look too closely into its parasitic lifestyle. It has a rigid proboscis which cannot be retracted:

Green alkanet has flower tubes and that are shorter than the length of a bee-fly’s rigid proboscis, so the fly has to hover away from the flower as it drinks the nectar:

A primrose, however, has a flower tube that is longer than the bee-fly proboscis:

Although this photo below from 2023 is unfortunately not in focus, it shows a bee-fly that has just fed on a primrose and its pale trombone tongue is still extended from the proboscis:

There are lots of cowslips in the meadows at the moment and this is another example of a very long flower tube needing specialised mouthparts to access the nectar. I have only ever seen bumble bees feeding from these, although I suspect that moths also do under the cover of darkness.

Unlike the bee-flies, a bumblebee can curl its proboscis away when not in use but in the photo below the bee is approaching a cowslip with it unfurled and ready for action:

The red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius), however, has a tongue that is less than a third of the length of the garden bumblebee, at about 6mm. This shorter length means they prefer shallower flowers and I have been seeing them a lot on dandelions this week. They can also bite holes into the sides of the deeper flowers to reach the nectar though.

I am a great hairy-footed flower bee enthusiast and now have six pots of Pulmonaria by the front door in the hope of luring these lovely bees into the garden so that I can admire them.

It is wonderful to have bees flying all around once more, but it can be so very frustrating trying to photograph them in action.

The reptiles are also up and out now:

Unfortunately its not just us that has spotted them and here is a slow worm in a magpie’s beak:

As we have been looking under the reptile sampling squares we’ve found a variety of small mammals, although they are fast and photography is again difficult. A nice bank vole here though:

I have run the moth trap several times both in the meadows and in the wood and have been getting some interesting moths, many of which I have never seen before. So far this year I have already added a pleasing nineteen new species to the meadows moth list and nine for the wood.

For their safety, I release the caught moths from the trap the next evening after the birds have roosted. When I went to let them fly one evening, I found that love had blossomed in the trap:

My rough calculation suggested that the tawny owl eggs in a box in the wood might be hatching over the Easter weekend, but so far I have not noticed a change in behaviour that suggests that this has happened. Several small mammals are being delivered to the box overnight but perhaps still only by the one bird:

These two photos below were taken on the same night, one at 10.30pm in the evening and the other at 5am the next morning. I would think that an owl wouldn’t need to take two baths a night at this time of year, and that this must be two different birds, one of which will be the female away from her eggs or young:

I have been seeing a nice variety of small birds visiting this pond recently including bullfinch, siskin and redpoll. Obviously not while this bird was there though:

A different pond has been visited by a buzzard this week:

There is a lot going on at this time of year and I have had to leave out many interesting photos to avoid this post becoming far too long and unwieldy. I do want to include these last two photos, though, where the good old trail cameras have managed to capture animals flying through the air:

I find myself more than usually busy with nature at this lovely time of year. I hope that you too have been able to get out and about to experience and enjoy the wonderful spring as she is gradually arriving.,

After a long, dark winter, it’s extremely heartening when everything starts coming to life again in spring. This year there is a very special highlight in the wood with tawny owls once more nesting in one of the boxes.

We are trying to get better photos of them but, with the female now on eggs, anything we do in the vicinity has to be really quick and quiet so as not to scare her.

It is exclusively the female bird that will be incubating the eggs. She will stay on them pretty much continuously for the 28-30 days that they take to hatch, with the male bringing her food. Having done a rough calculation based on when I last saw both birds out and about together, my best guess is that the eggs will start hatching over the upcoming Easter weekend.

There should be two or three eggs in the box which will be white and smooth and roughly the size of a golf ball:

Ideally the camera could do with moving a bit further back because the birds are not quite in focus but we don’t think we can do that now without disturbing her.

Lots of mice have been arriving by night:

I suppose it is inevitable that some of these rodents being brought to the box are going to be dormice, but it’s difficult to tell in the dark. I did think the thickness of this rodent’s tail below looked suspiciously dormouse-like:

We have now trained a second camera onto the box as well. This one is quite a long way away but it might get some good shots when the chicks start branching out of the box:

Every day stock doves come and forlornly hang around the box. I don’t know why they haven’t cut their losses, realised that the box is already occupied this year, and gone to look for somewhere else to nest:

The owls are frequently coming down to bathe in the pond in the marjoram clearing:

They are properly bathing, not just drinking:

Another camera is now once more looking at the hole in a cherry tree where green woodpeckers have nested for the previous two years. The birds have been inspecting the hole this spring, but so far haven’t committed themselves. The camera has been seeing other things, though, such as this hare going past on the track behind:

A burrow that was used as a fox den a few years ago has had a camera on it ever since, and it is interesting to see how many things stop by. Rabbits, foxes, squirrels and badgers are regular visitors and recently a polecat-like mustelid was also peering in. This week, however, it was the turn of an enormous buzzard who is very partial to a bit of rabbit:

The Common twayblade is an easily-overlooked orchid being yellow-green and less showy than other UK orchids. Several have now started to come up in their normal spot. It looks like the slugs and snails have been enjoying them as well:

Now that I have a battery powered moth trap, I have gone mobile! I am really interested to see what moths live in the wood and intend to do some trapping there this year. I set the trap up overnight this week well away from where the tawnies are nesting:

The scarce prominent is one moth species that flies in April and which I am hoping lives in the wood. Its larvae feed on mature silver birch and we do have a lot of these, so I was feeling quite optimistic. However, all positivity evaporated the next morning when we returned to the wood and found the trap completely empty. I will try again next week and will surely catch something then.

Over in the meadows, a pair of mallards visit our ponds at this time every year for some rest and recreation. The female duck is egg-laying and is weakened by this energy-intensive process, so the male accompanies her wherever she goes as her bodyguard.

Mallards can seem so ordinary and domestic when they are dabbling around on a boating lake, being fed bread by toddlers. But when they arrive here in the meadows the feel of them is very different, like a pair of properly wild ducks.

Last year a mallard laid her eggs at the bottom of my sister’s Berkshire garden. There were eleven eggs, each slightly larger than a typical chicken egg, so it is easy to see that the female would need to recuperate whilst she is laying them:

This year’s ducks have been spending large periods of time down at the wild pond. After an extended swim, they often get out of the water to do some preening:

And then have a little snooze:

However, it’s important that they always keep an eye open because a couple of minutes after the photo above was taken, this happened:

Foxes are perfectly capable of swimming but this one obviously decided that, once he had lost the element of surprise, pursuing them any further was unlikely to succeed:

The next day he tried again but with the same result and with the ducks still unscathed on the water:

I have to apologise about the state of the pond. For the first time last summer it developed some blanket weed even though we are always extremely careful not to add nutrients. The weed has unfortunately returned this spring and it is a most unattractive look. We are hoping that, if we ignore it, it will eventually sort itself out and go away again.

Up at the top of the second meadow, I see that the mangey vixen has had her cubs and is now copiously lactating:

It is always interesting to see what the magpies are finding to eat. Here is the ringed bird with a snail:

And here, unfortunately, it has caught itself a vole:

This year’s nest building is obviously reaching the final stages, with some soft lining going in:

The jay is a bird often to be seen around the meadows. They must surely nest in the vicinity but I have never had any indication of where that might be:

A female blackbird rejecting the advances on a male on the gate. He has managed to make himself look so threatening:

To see the ringed female kestrel, now approaching her seventh birthday and still hunting in the meadows, is another Easter treat for me:

Her ringed right leg seen below confirms that this is the same bird:

As we wait with bated breath to see if there are any badger cubs this year, I now have cameras on three of the entrances to the sett. This swirl of badgers is at the entrance to a burrow on the cliff:

A badger is emerging from a second tunnel, a relatively newly-dug one that opens directly up into the meadows:

This third badger hole below has had fresh bedding dragged into it this week so might be a contender to be the one where the cubs first appear. It too opens out into the meadows but is covered by a thick tangle of brambles:

Looking back at my records over the past ten years, I see that the earliest that we had previously seen a badger cub above ground is 7th April. But now, just as I was about to publish this post, I have some late-arriving news. The photo below is of the second burrow and, just visible in the bottom right, is a small badger cub:

I hope to have better photos by next time.

We have some of the family coming for Easter and I have been happily decorating the house with lots of eggs and other things in lovely pastel shades:

With the weather here currently forecast to be fair at the weekend, I wish you a very enjoyable and chocolatey Easter.

I went to school in Brighton for two years back in the late 70s and have had a soft spot for the place ever since. Now, half a century on, our son and his wife have moved to Hove and are loving it too. We went to visit them this week and stayed a few nights in an apartment close to Hove seafront.

On our first evening there, we walked east along the seafront to the end of Brighton’s Palace Pier. The essence of the seafront and of Palace Pier itself has remained largely unchanged in the intervening fifty years. The West Pier, however, was looking rather sorry for itself:

The West Pier opened in 1866 and a concert hall was then added in 1916. The pier reached its peak popularity around this time, with two million visitors between 1918 and 1919. However, visitor numbers then started declining and its owners could not no longer meet its maintenance costs. They eventually filed for bankruptcy in 1965 and the pier was closed to the public because of safety concerns in 1975. When I was living in Brighton a couple of years later, it was on sale for a mere £100, so long as you could then guarantee to spend the million pounds or so that was required to repair it. Sadly, this never happened and parts of the pier began to fall into the sea. Two major fires in 2003, thought to be arson, led to it being declared beyond repair:

There is now a golden spiral art installation on the seafront made out of twenty-four cast-iron columns salvaged from the ruined pier:

As we stood on the Palace Pier and looked towards the West Pier, the sun was going down at the end of the day:

And the seafront was alive with young people

Throughout the winter Brighton is famous for its starling murmuration where the birds dance in the sky before settling down to spend the night underneath both piers. By now these birds will have left for their breeding grounds but Dave and I still inspected with interest the pilings where they will be roosting again this autumn:

Jonny took a photo of the Brighton starling murmuration around the Palace Pier back in November:

We were on Hove seafront on the next evening of our stay and there was another amazing sunset:

Brighton is also famous for being the last outpost for elm trees in the UK. In 1967 Dutch Elm disease came to Britain on some infected elm timber from North America. It’s a micro fungal disease carried by the elm bark beetle which feeds on the wood beneath the bark, spreading the disease as it moves from tree to tree. As a result of the arrival of this disease, twenty-five million elms were felled nationwide in an unsuccessful attempt to stop it.

Brighton, however, took a different approach. They pruned out infected branches at the first sight of infection, set bait traps for elm bark beetles at the city limits and dug trenches between neighbouring trees to prevent the disease passing across by root contact. This, together with the natural physical barrier of the treeless South Downs to the north, the English Channel to the south, a prevailing southwesterly wind across sea rather than land and an early warning helpline has helped Brighton keep much of its elm population.

Other than in Brighton, only around 1,000 mature elm trees survive in Britain. Brighton, however still has around 17,000 of them, many planted in Georgian and Victorian times when the city became a fashionable seaside resort. The trees grow well on the chalky soil and in the salty sea air. They weren’t quite in leaf for our visit this week but, once we got our eye in for what the bark looked like, we were pleased to spot elm trees all over the place. It is a sad fact that we had never properly seen mature elms before.

The Preston Twins were a pair of English elm trees (Ulmus minor ‘Atinia’) planted about 1613 in Preston Park in Brighton that were believed to be the oldest and largest English Elms in the world. However, in the summer of 2018 the eastern twin tragically became infected by Dutch elm disease although it didn’t show any symptoms until summer 2019 by which time the disease had spread to the roots. A trench was immediately dug between the two twins to sever any connecting roots in an attempt to save the other tree and the eastern twin was then cut down.

Now, though, the eastern twin has returned, once more standing next to its remaining twin. The artist Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva removed and burned the diseased bark and then preserved the wood beneath, turning it into a sculpture called The Gilded Elm to raise awareness of Dutch elm disease.

The Knepp Estate is a 3,500 acre pioneering rewilding project lying twenty-five kilometres to the north of Brighton. After years of losing money trying to grow arable crops and keep a diary herd on the heavy clay soil, the decision was made in 2000 to stop farming altogether. Instead, roaming herds of longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and deer shape the land and the results have been pretty spectacular as wildlife has returned to recolonise the land in droves.

Enormous increases in numbers of critically endangered nightingales, turtle doves and purple emperor butterflies are often quoted as their most notable successes, but there is also so much more to celebrate.

On one of the days we were in Hove, we drove up to Knepp to walk some of the footpaths around the estate.

Looking out over the rewildling project:

Old English longhorn cattle create diverse habitats on the land through their grazing, browsing and churning of the soil:

Thorny scrub patches act as natural cages, protecting tree seedlings from being eaten by the herbivores:

Six raised tree platforms around the estate allow visitors far-reaching views over the land. I am very envious of all their many beautiful oak trees:

This second tree platform looked out over the River Adur that runs through the estate:

In recent years beavers have been reintroduced onto the River Adur, creating further habitat types and increasing biodiversity. Since 2016 white storks, once a breeding bird in Britain, are also being reintroduced. The storks first bred there in 2020 and the colony has been growing rapidly with 53 chicks fledging in 2024.

Some of the original reintroduced storks came from Warsaw zoo where injured wild birds are recuperated. Although they can now fly, they can’t fly well enough to migrate and they remain at Knepp over the winter. On our visit this week the migrating birds are yet to return for the summer, but we still saw four storks:

We also spotted a man-made stork nest on the roof of one of the estate cottages. It looks like this one hasn’t been used yet though:

Using my telephoto lens I got distant photos of the two treehouses that you can stay in on the estate:

This was of particular interest to us because the treehouse on the right is where our son Jonty proposed to his girlfriend, now his wife, Ellie. Touchingly, he was so nervous as he prepared to propose that he tripped over and fell on his face.

Although we ourselves would never choose to live in a city, I can completely see why Jonny and Hayley love Hove so much. It is a vibrant place with some beautiful architecture and many lovely shops, cafes and restaurants.

There is always a lot going on such as the men’s cold-water dipping group that Jonny attends and took Dave along to this week. The men meet on a Sunday morning at Hove beach for sea swimming, connection, and peer support and Dave found the whole experience very uplifting:

I think Dave’s arty photo taken from the Palace Pier as the sun went down is a suitable choice with which to finish this week:

We fitted quite a lot into our few days at Brighton and Hove but there is much more still to do, and we are looking forward to getting to know the city better over the coming years.

Tawny owls are early breeders and possible nest sites are checked out as early as October and November. Eggs are usually laid in March, followed by hatching and owlets appearing in April. We may still be having bouts of some pretty wintery weather at the moment but I am fairly confident that a pair of tawny owls are already nesting in one of the boxes in the wood this year.

Back in 2022 it was this same box that delivered us our finest wildlife moment when the Johns ringed two tawny owl chicks that were being reared in there:

Although we didn’t have the trail camera in a great position, we did get some photos of the chicks in the days following the ringing as they became more adventurous, perching on branches around the box:

About a week after the Johns ringed the chicks, the adult owls were photographed luring the young to fledge by perching nearby with food:

And then it was all over – the chicks left the box and were not seen again. Four years on and there has been no record sent to the BTO (who organise the British ringing scheme) of those ringed tawnies so we don’t know the next chapter in their stories. Hopefully they are now happily raising their own young somewhere.

Since that successful fledging in 2022, each spring there seemed to be a battle between the owls and the squirrels to see who could claim supremacy and nest in the box. Sadly the squirrels always won out, although stock doves also raised two broods in there last year after the squirrels had left.

But this year the owls have once more gained possession of the box. Food is being brought in but, still in mid March, this must surely be for the adult that is sitting on eggs rather than to feed young:

In fact, every night a lot of mice are arriving at the box:

We have just swapped the camera at this box over and are only now getting better photos. The previous camera was registering a lot of owl action but the camera was full of water and quality was not great

There is a shallow pool made out of a painters tray in the same clearing as the box, and the owls have been frequently coming down to that, both at night and by day:

We will be following the progress of these owls with much interest over the coming weeks.

Last year a clump of frogspawn was laid in a new pond dug in the marjoram clearing. This must have been the first spawn in the wood for many, many years since there are no signs of there ever having been a pond before. However, the few weeks following the laying of the spawn last year were very dry, the water level got very low and a grass snake also took up residence. As a result, I don’t believe that a single tadpole survived to emerge from the water as a frog.

This year, although our woodland neighbour reported that spawn had arrived in her wood some time ago, our pond remained resolutely empty of any amphibian activity. Then, last week, I saw on the camera that a single male frog had arrived and was staging a solitary vigil for a female. He was on his own in there for several nights:

When we next visited the wood, it was fantastic to see that his persistence had paid off and a female had indeed arrived for him. A clump of spawn was now nestling in amongst the weed:

Should we have another dry spring this year, I will certainly ensure that the water level in this pond is kept topped up this time to give these little things the best possible chance.

Sparrowhawks come to this same pond daily to have a bath:

An unknown mustelid has visited the wood several times this week although never showing its face. Polecat, feral ferret or a hybrid between the two? We do not know.

But rabbits will probably make up 60% of this predator’s diet:

Woodcock haven’t been seen on the cameras recently and have now probably left on their long journey back to their breeding grounds. Redwings are still here though:

Strong winds overnight on Thursday brought a tree crashing down across one of the clearings as a dramatic reminder to us not to visit the wood in high winds:

Across in the meadows, a fox with the beginnings of mange is now coming to the nightly peanuts and, looking at her tummy, I would say that she is pregnant:

It is some time since I last treated our resident foxes for mange, but I have now swung into action once more. This is not only to try to cure this pregnant vixen, but also to protect the other foxes living here with her:

There is still a month to go before any badger cubs that may be underground are allowed up so that we can get a look at them. Meanwhile the adults are going about their daily business:

And this is a funny photo I think:

We found this common shrew under a reptile sampling square. What a lovely shiny nose it has:

It is larger and greyer than the pygmy shrews that we often find in the dormice boxes in the wood.

Although kestrels are primarily after field voles, they will also eat a shrew particularly when vole numbers are low:

On 15th April 2015, Dave, the dog and I visited Iffley Meadows beside the Thames at Oxford. This is a famous April spectacle where thousands of snake’s-head fritillaries grow wild in the wet water meadows there:

We had actually visited on the day of the annual count by the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) – there had been 85,000 of these amazing plants counted the previous year:

Snake’s-head fritillaries also grow well in Walmer Castle grounds near our meadows in Kent, although these have been planted:

Even though it was not a sunny day, early bumblebees, Bombus pratorum, were working their way from flower to flower. They disappear right up into the flower and emerge with yellow pollen all over their backs:

We found several pine ladybirds, Exochomus quadripustulatus, on apple trees in the kitchen garden. Here one is with a 7-spot ladybird to show the size difference:

A pair of mating pine ladybirds with their distinctive red commas:

The rookery in the grounds has become very active at this time of year and large numbers of noisy rooks are returning there at dusk:

Elsewhere in the gardens is this statue of the Roman God Mercury:

One of the participants of this week’s wildlife tour noticed that Mercury has hibernating harlequin ladybirds tucked around the back of his neck:

And we were amused to see that this wasn’t the only place he had ladybirds:

And on that disturbing note I will finish for today. We are really enjoying spring as she gradually unfurls herself and I am hoping to get better photos of the nesting owls for next time.

Last week we stayed in a cottage on Curry Farm in east Essex, a 65 acre private nature reserve near Bradwell-on-Sea on the Blackwater Estuary.

To my mind, Essex is a much underestimated county – this part in the east has lots of rivers and estuaries, and is really very rural with a lot of wildlife to be seen.

Stephen Dewick and his wife Jean live at Curry farm today but it was Stephen’s late father who bought the farm back in 1932 and apples and then cereals were grown there until the early 1990s. Now, however, the land is totally given over to wildlife conservation. Stephen, like his father before him, has been extremely interested in macro moths his entire life and, incredibly, a moth trap has been run at Curry Farm on an almost nightly basis since 1946!

But it’s not any old moth trap because it is apparently the largest in the country. It is a purpose built building with soil banked up around its sides to keep it cool and a light on the roof to bring the moths in:

The light has a 400 watt high-UV bulb:

Moths are drawn to the light and fall into a large funnel around it, leading down into the room below:

Every day of our stay we went into the moth trap with Stephen to inspect the day’s catch, while he told us about the interesting moths he has caught at Curry Farm over the years. Even though it is still only early March, he is already getting a lot of moths and I cannot imagine what it will be like in there over the summer. Rather than counting and logging every moth, though, each day he records which macro moths are new for the year as well as always being on the look out for any rarities.

In 1951 one such rarity to the UK was first recorded at Curry Farm by his father and the moth was named after him – the Dewick’s Plusia moth. Until recently this moth has been a very rare immigrant to this country but has now almost certainly started breeding here. Recorded sightings of this moth have surged since 2018 in southern and eastern counties. Who knows, perhaps I will find one on my trap at home this summer:

One sunny morning of our stay we spent time exploring the reserve. Stephen is kept pretty busy because he manages it all entirely on his own:

The nearby Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall is one of the oldest, largely intact churches in England and is still in regular use:

Just beyond St Peter-on-the-Wall, there is the Bradwell shell bank, now a 30 acre nature reserve where apparently little tern and ringed plover breed:

As we walked along the shell bank, we were amazed to see such huge numbers of dark-bellied brent geese feeding on the winter wheat in some poor farmer’s field:

The reason we were in Essex was to go on two separate Naturetrek birding days. The first of these was in the Heybridge Basin, near Maldon. Unfortunately it was a foggy day which wasn’t great for looking at birds, but at least it was calm and dry:

Although the fog remained the entire time, we spent a gentle day strolling along the estuary in a small group of interesting people, with our expert guide Neil showing us many more birds than we would otherwise have noticed:

On the second Naturetrek day trip we met Neil again at the RSPB Wallasea reserve. This is a brand new and really interesting reserve and one that we will definitely return to whenever we are in the area. Between 2011 and 2015, over 3 million tonnes of spoil from London’s newly dug Crossrail tunnels were transported to Essex to create the reserve. This earth was used to raise the low-lying land, construct new sea defenses, and create a 740-hectare habitat of lagoons, mudflats, and salt marshes

By lunchtime we had already built up a list of sixty bird species that had been spotted. We’d had good views of a hen harrier and this photo below is of a greater scaup and a red breasted merganser – both birds that I have very rarely seen:

When Dave was a boy living in north Devon in the early 1970s, a little egret turned up on the nearby estuary resulting in a major bird twitch that he can still remember clearly. Little egrets were only occasional vagrants in the UK until the 1980s but now it is estimated that there are 2,500 breeding pairs here:

Similarly, when Dave and I started getting properly interested in birds about twenty years ago, the Mediterranean gull was still quite a notable and exciting bird. At Wallasea, however, there are now whole islands full of them:

Brown hares are plentiful along the coastal areas of Essex and we enjoyed seeing them throughout our stay there, although rarely managing a photo. Here are three having a little rest from their chasing around and boxing at Wallasea:

Unfortunately it started raining soon after lunch, scuppering our chances of seeing the short-eared owls and barn owls that are regular on the reserve.

We had a really good few days in Essex. It isn’t so very far away from us here in Kent and, such is the lure of the walk-in moth trap, that we have now booked to stay there again for a few nights this summer.

How many moths will be in this trap each morning when we revisit Curry Farm in August?

February is an exciting month in the British wildlife calendar. More lovely spring flowers are appearing daily, invertebrates are finally starting to emerge and the amphibian breeding season gets underway. The soft churring of male frogs from the meadow ponds is now one of my favourite sounds.

But frog numbers are really down in the meadows this year. It was certainly a very dry spring last year, which was not good news for tadpole survival, but common frogs live an average of 5-7 years in the wild and should be able to cope with the occasional unsuccessful year. Herons have not been an issue recently and there is no obvious sign of disease, so we don’t know what the problem is and it’s all very perplexing.

This time lapse photo taken by a trail camera in 2018 gives some indication of quite how many frogs used to gather in the wild pond:

Then, in 2019, there was a massacre when every single frog in the pond was picked off by a heron, but since then numbers had gradually been recovering. This year, however, only a handful of males have turned up and so far there are only two clumps of spawn, indicating that just two females have arrived.

Although I have been observing and worrying about frogs in the meadows for the last decade, I am relatively new to watching the toads in the Queen Mother’s pond at Walmer Castle. So I am unable to say if the forty-two toads that we saw there one night this week is an increase in numbers or a decline, but I do know, however, that I absolutely love to see them:

We visited the pond again in the daylight a couple of days later and found that strings of spawn were being laid:

Back in the meadows, invertebrates are now starting to appear. This is an oak gall wasp that was on the windscreen of the car:

The large and ponderous western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, is native to North America but was introduced to Europe in 1999 and has since spread rapidly. We often see them here:

And the first butterfly was seen in the meadows on 24th February. This peacock will have spent the winter as an adult, probably tucked away in a tree:

The 2026 ringing season has got underway when John spent a morning this week in the wood. He ringed thirty-eight birds, most of which were blue tits and great tits. He did however, catch both a male and a female great spotted woodpecker:

There were some outstanding jobs resulting from our maintenance tour of the dormice boxes and large raptor bird boxes last week.

Dave has made a new floor for this barn owl box to replace the previous one that was rotting:

Eight of the dormice boxes needed replacing because of squirrel damage, like this one below:

I had ordered new boxes that have now arrived and gone up in the wood. The monthly dormouse monitoring tours will start in April

We also needed to locate and clean out the twenty-eight small bird boxes. It was a bit of a challenge to remember where they all were:

We found bird nests in nineteen of them. This bird box below had had a very busy year. There is a wedge of decaying blue tit nest at the very bottom of the box, and above that is a black layer of a tree bumblebee nest. Once the bees had departed by midsummer, a dormouse moved in and made its nest at the top

Back in June we had noticed the tree bumblebees in the box but they didn’t stay very long:

But it was this triple-holed bird box that delivered the biggest surprise:

There wasn’t a dormouse nest in the box, but we did however find an active dormouse:

If temperatures are mild, then dormice do sometimes wake up during the winter and will go back into hibernation again if it gets colder. This uses up precious energy reserves though and ideally they need to forage to top their levels up while they are awake. Luckily there are lots of hazel catkins around now to eat, so this little one should be alright.

On two gloriously warm and sunny February days this week we completed our winter’s coppicing work:

We feel quite pleased with what we have an achieved this year:

As if to underline the fact that winter is over and it is time to stop working in the wood before the birds start to breed, our new clearing was alive with lime-green brimstone butterflies. There were so many of them flying through, some stopping briefly to nectar up on the the few primroses that are already starting to flower:

Brimstone butterflies hibernate as adults in dense evergreen vegetation such as ivy and holly. Once they awaken, they particularly like to feed on primroses and pretty soon now the woodland floor will be awash with these.

After those two warm sunny days, I ran the moth trap in the meadows to see if they had made a difference to the number of moths around. They surely had because I caught seven different species including this oak beauty which I think might be one of the most attractive moths I’ve ever come across :

The oak beauty is apparently a common moth found primarily in mature oak woodland but I had never seen one before or even noticed it in the field guides. So it was an exciting surprise and what a wonderful launch of the 2026 mothing season.

We have managed an unprecedented number of coppicing sessions in the wood this winter and, most unusually, are pleased with what we have achieved.

Coppicing looks drastic but is vital for woodland health. It creates a mosaic of diverse habitats, from open sunny glades in the first few years after cutting, to dense scrub as the new growth matures. This is good for biodiversity, as well as prolonging the life of the hazel and, by keeping the tree in a high growth rate, is really effective at capturing carbon. Definitely a win-win, but there’s no doubt that it’s jolly hard work for our ageing bodies, even with the assistance of the battery chain saw.

We have been creating dead hedges with the cut hazel. These provide shelter and protected corridors within the wood:

Log piles, made with the beefier bits of wood, will soon start to decay and be ideal for beetle larvae:

One member of the coppicing team just has a supervisory role from the back of the car:

There is not long to go now before work must finish on 1st March for the beginning of the bird breeding season. In some ways this will be a relief because it’s an excuse to stop coppicing, but we hope to have achieved a bit more by then if the weather allows.

We have also done a tour around the wood to clean and maintain the dormouse boxes and raptor boxes before the start of spring.

All of the raptor boxes had nests in them and I presume that these would mostly have been squirrels, although intriguingly there was much variation in the look of the nests. We must pay more attention to what’s going on in these large bird boxes this year:

Before the beginning of March we will also need to try to locate and then clean out all of the many smaller bird boxes that are dotted around the wood – there is still a lot to do and time is fast running out.

And where is this squirrel taking those leaves? I do hope it is not to one of the newly cleaned out raptor boxes:

There is work to be done in the meadows as well as we start the annual war against the Alexanders. These thuggish plants grow far too strongly in this coastal location and, given half a chance, would take over and swamp all other vegetation. For many springs now I have spent hours digging them up and ensuring that no seed is set, but I’m still not confident that it is a battle that we are winning:

This is what can happen if you let your guard down:

Whilst I was out Alexandering, I found a vole nest that had presumably been built within a large grass tussock. A fox has now located it and dug it out:

We were in Devon last week and the frog breeding season was in full swing. Every year this starts in the milder west of the country and moves slowly eastwards, as demonstrated by the latest spawn survey that the Freshwater and Habitats Trust published on 17th February:

Although we have seen some male frogs starting to hang out in our ponds here in the meadows, the party has not yet properly got underway and there is no spawn. It won’t be long now though.

We often come across things that have been picked up from the seashore by birds, who then drop them down onto the meadows. Dave has recently found a crab shell and part of a lobster claw:

We are building up a bit of a collection from the meadows:

Mermaid’s purses, the leathery egg cases of sharks, skates and rays, are one of these marine treasures that we discover most frequently in the meadows. These pouches are usually anchored to the sea floor, protecting the egg and then subsequently the developing embryo for up to a year. However, they can get washed up onto beaches particularly after a storm, and are then taken by the birds.

The trail cameras caught a crow with a mermaid’s purse:

It pecked right into the centre of the pouch to get at the egg or embryo:

Recent rough weather must have dislodged many of these eggs sacs from the seabed because they have been turning up in the meadows, all broken open by corvids to get at the protein within:

The Shark Trust website has information on how to ID and report the mermaid’s purses that you might find on the seashore:

I rehydrated the three different types of mermaids purse in our collection of seashore items found in the meadows:

I’m pleased that I’ve finally put some effort into finding out a bit more about these mermaids purses and will now appreciate them so much more when I come across them.

One night recently was forecast to be relatively mild and calm, so I ran the moth trap to see if I could catch any winter-flying moths. The next morning the trap was disappointingly empty, but I did find a pale brindled beauty that had been drawn in by the light and roosted up on the wall behind:

The trail cameras are mostly fogged up with condensation at the moment after all the rain but I do have a few images to show this time. Here is a ringed magpie who has unfortunately found a hibernating slow worm:

Here is the ringed bird again, this time with a mouse:

And a photo taken whilst we were away shows that these birds are already starting to build this year’s nest:

I have also been seeing blackbirds with sloes on this gate. The sloes are usually left on the blackthorn until later in the winter, since freezing converts their starches to sugars making them more palatable:

The ringed kestrel, the doyenne of the meadows, has also been around along with her mate:

It is messy work digging up worms from the wet winter soil:

If there are going to be badger cubs this year, then they will have been born by now and are tucked away underground. They won’t be allowed up above ground until April, although some years we get lucky and see them being carried around between the various tunnels before then:

There is still so much darkness available in February that it is unusual to see a badger above ground in the daylight:

I never tire of watching the badgers going about their daily business. A bit of mutual grooming here:

And some scent marking to reinforce family bonds:

We have been tasked with getting some reasonable photographs of the birdlife at Walmer Castle that can be laminated and shown on the wildlife walks if needed. We visited the castle this week but only managed a photo of jays and a blackbird:

We shall keep on trying.

A show of cyclamen under a tree in the castle grounds is a particularly cheering sight:

We are now looking forward to the rain stopping, so that we can get out and fully appreciate the spring as it starts to arrive.

Dartmoor is the largest and wildest open moorland in Southern England, famous for its rugged landscape of granite tors. It is a very special place and one to which we keep returning, each time getting to know it and love it a little bit more. We had never been on the moor in the depths of February before, though, as we were last week.

We were staying for a week at Sanders, a Devonshire longhouse that was built around 1500 and has been saved by the Landmark Trust who bought it in 1976. The Trust buys imperilled, historically-interesting buildings and sympathetically restores them to retain as many of their significant features as possible, whilst also converting them into holiday accommodation. The rental income then goes towards funding the ongoing maintenance of the two hundred buildings that are now under their care.

Sanders îs part of the ancient hamlet of Lettaford, situated in a sheltered hollow on the north east side of the moor and still only consisting of three farmhouses and their attendant buildings grouped around a green. There is also a converted chapel, which is a Landmark as well and in which we stayed a couple of years ago.

We were amused to see that the weather forecast was predicting rain for every hour of every day for the week of our stay. This unfortunately did prove to be mostly accurate, particularly in the first half of the week. In fact Dartmoor has been experiencing exceptionally high rainfall recently with an almost unbelievable 4.76 metres having fallen at White Barrow in 2026 so far. But there were some parts of our week that were dry and we were anyway well equipped for adverse weather – we ended up having a wonderful time exploring the wild and deserted moor in wintertime.

All the mosses and lichens of Dartmoor look at their very best in wet conditions and I only wish that we knew a bit more about them:

Fungus thrives in the mild, wet climate as well:

One day we did a circular walk starting from the Meldon reservoir in the northwest of the moor. After all that rain., the water was dramatically overtopping the dam:

As we climbed into the hills beyond the reservoir, it was not actually raining but there was a strong, cold wind blowing. We came upon a group of really lovely Dartmoor ponies, backed into a gorse bush for shelter. They all looked very similar with their beautiful blonde manes, tubby torsos and short legs and I presume that they were a family group:

As we approached the summit of Black Tor, we were excited to find some clumps of frogspawn:

But this was just the start. As we continued to climb, there were many hundreds of balls of spawn all over the wet flanks of the tor and we stopped remarking on them after a while.

There must be a huge population of frogs living on this exposed, high altitude hillside.

There was a satisfying amount of horizontally-weathered granite at the top of Black Tor:

It was at the summit of Black tor that we got the first view of our main objective of the day – Black-a-Tor copse, tucked away below the tor and beside the West Okement river:

There are three fragments of high-altitude, ancient oak woodland remaining on Dartmoor. Wistman’s Wood near Two Bridges is the best known and most accessible and I have visited it several times in the past, including going on a field trip there in 1979, back when I was a botany student at Exeter University. But I had never before been to either of the other two woods: Black-a-Tor Copse and Piles Copse.

Black-a-Tor Copse is the largest of the three fragments at 29 acres, and sits 380 metres above sea level. The pedunculate oaks have grown through large granite boulders to create a woodland which is nationally important for rare lichens and mosses. The horsehair lichen, Bryoria smithii, only grows in Britain here and at Wistman’s Wood.

We didn’t see any horsehair lichen or any of the other rare lichens, but then we didn’t really know what we were looking for. There was a lot of beard lichen though:

The wood reaches down to the river:

You are requested to keep to the path that runs through the wood to keep damage of this fragile ecosystem to a minimum:

Natural England’s website also says that twenty species of breeding bird have been recorded at the wood. We would like to return to Black-a-Tor copse when the trees are in leaf, the birds are nesting and we know a bit more about the lichens that we might expect to see there.

On another day we walked in the Teign valley which is one of the few remaining places where our British native daffodil still grows wild. In two or three weeks there will be a wonderful display along the banks of the river, but we were a bit too early this time. We did manage to find one or two that were just coming out though:

On a visit in March 2020, the valley was filled with flowering native daffodils:

We did a circular walk starting at a pub in the middle of nowhere, the Fingle Bridge Inn:

Even though it has rained so much on Dartmoor this January, the river levels this winter have apparently only reached the lower terrace of the pub. Last winter some tables were washed away on the upper terrace from behind the fence.

Fingle Bridge is a 17th century granite packhorse bridge that crosses the Teign at the pub:

There is a photo on the wall of the pub that shows the river in a much less forgiving mood:

Looking down into the Teign valley from the grounds of Castle Drogo:

There was an opportunity to photograph some more Dartmoor ponies on this walk, although these ones had more sensible hairstyles:

We went off the moor one day to the village of Buckland Monachorum just to the west. The Garden House has a wonderful garden that we had visited before, but now in February it was holding its annual snowdrop festival.

Nearly 400 snowdrop varieties grow in the garden and I now have two new favourites: Treasure Island and Fieldgate Primrose Legacy

How wonderful to have so many snowdrops that you can afford to pick them and put them in a vase:

Lionel and Katharine Fortescue bought the house and ten acres of grounds in the summer of 1945 and spent the next forty years transforming it into an absolutely glorious garden. They set up a trust which has continued to care for the garden after their deaths in the 1980s

We went to this garden in June about ten years ago and were amazed at the beauty of the flower meadow there. But even in February the garden was well worth a visit:

We might have been off the moor but the lichens were flourishing here as well:

And the frogs were churring away and laying spawn in one of the many ponds in the garden:

There was a yellow warning for rain on the Monday of our week on Dartmoor and we decided to walk to find an old clapper bridge near Two Bridges before the weather got too bad:

There are still around two hundred clapper bridges on Dartmoor. These ancient, stone-slab structures were built to allow packhorses, farmers and miners to cross Dartmoor’s rivers and streams. Over the course the week we also saw the 13th century clapper bridge over the East Dart at Postbridge…

… and another clapper bridge over the East Dart just as it joins the West Dart at Dartsmeet:

Having successfully found the Two Bridges clapper bridge, the rain still wasn’t too heavy so we went to St Raphael’s Chapel at Huccaby which is famous locally for its snowdrop display in February:

We then went to one of our favourite pubs for lunch – the Warren House Inn, which stands isolated and remote in the middle of the moor. It has no mains services of any sort and was built in 1845 to service the local tin mining industry which has now all gone.

After lunch it was raining very hard but we popped into Chagford on the way back and were considerably cheered to see the crocus display in the church graveyard there:

We were actually in the West Country for a very particular reason. Our daughter now lives in Perranporth in Cornwall with her family and she has just had a baby daughter whom we were very keen to meet. We travelled off the moor to Cornwall at the beginning of the week and then again at the end to make the acquaintance of our new granddaughter to whom I dedicate this post:

Welcome to the World, baby Isla!

Managing the hedgerows here is one of the most important things for us to get right. Tall hedgerows with wide bases provide food and shelter for all sorts of wildlife as well as being essential corridors linking habitats. Hedges support up to 80% of our woodland birds, 50% of our mammals and 30% of our butterflies as well as much other invertebrate life.

But in order to stay as a hedge rather than growing up into trees, the occasional cut is required. Hawthorn and Blackthorn only flower on old wood, so if only a third of the hedgerow is cut each year, it will then be just this third that will not flower and produce fruit the next season. Butterfly Conservation, however, argue that hedges should be cut less often than that, and only then in the late winter, to allow the many invertebrates that overwinter on the wood to complete their life cycles.

We use a nearby and reliably good agricultural contractor and this week a large green and yellow John Deere tractor arrived in the meadows to trim back our hedges:

Although we have a kilometre of hedge here, only half of it is actively managed. The other half has not been cut for decades and is now so overgrown and ivy-clad that it can no longer be cut with a flail head on a tractor. This is an unhealthy state for any hedge to be in and bits have already started falling over, but it is still producing a lot of fruit as well as offering all manner of safe places for invertebrates to overwinter.

Five years ago we planted an 85m stretch of mixed native hedgerow and it has already started to bear fruit. I am still annually pruning this with secateurs to encourage it bush out.

The remaining half a kilometre of hedgerow is cut with a flail head every other year:

The flail head rotates at 3,000 rpm and the cut vegetation is munched up into tiny bits and effectively disappears as mulch into the hedgerow rather than needing to be cleared up.

It is always a slightly shocking sight to see it in the meadows.

The heavy tractor makes quite a mess of the soft January ground:

The hedgerow took six hours to cut this week. Although we do need to give the contractors enough work to justify the trip over here, perhaps the job could be divided into two, or maybe even three, sections in the future to be done on successive years. In this way we would be achieving the rotation recommended as best practice to manage the hedgerows for wildlife.

Dave and I are part of the Walmer Castle volunteer wildlife team, monitoring and recording the wildlife there, as well as helping with the wildlife walks of the grounds that are put on for visitors to the Castle.

These days the Castle is open to the public as well as being the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. It is also a historic garden and the National Collection of Greatorex double snowdrops has its home there. Other snowdrop varieties are grown as well and some of these are already out in flower and being displayed in the kitchen garden for us to admire:

The snowdrops had even attracted a hoverfly in the weak January sunshine:

Last week we went down into one of the tunnels under the Castle to see what butterflies and moths might be hibernating there.

We didn’t find any hibernating butterflies down there but we did find three species of moth. Only a very small minority (2%) of British moths hibernate as adults and the herald is one of few that does. Its larval foodplants are willows and poplars and there aren’t many of those trees around here, so it was nice to see two heralds in the Walmer Castle tunnel this week:

There were also three twenty-plume moths. The caterpillars of these moths feed on the leaves and buds of honeysuckle:

In March 2023 I found one of these moths in the house. The light from the alarm box shining through its wings showed what an odd structure they are:

I also found six Bloxworth snouts down in the tunnels. Until recently this was only a very rare immigrant to mainland Britain, but has became established along the south coast and now seems to be spreading inland. The moth got its common name from being first discovered on an outhouse door at Bloxworth rectory in Dorset in 1884:

There are two generations each year, the first flying in July and August, and the second in September and October. It is this second brood that will overwinter as adults in tunnels where the temperature is more stable. The larvae feed mostly on pellitory-of-the-wall, Parietaria judaica, which is a plant that grows plentifully amongst the Castle’s stonework.

A graph from the Kent Moth Group website shows sightings of the Bloxworth snout in Kent over time:

We also saw the egg sac of a cave spider, Meta menardi, dangling on a 5cm silken thread from the roof:

This crow has been named Russell (ie Russell Crowe) by the English Heritage staff at the drawbridge where it regularly hangs out on the battlements:

The kestrels are also still being seen most days in the trees flanking the Castle drive:

A family of sparrowhawks were raised in the Castle grounds last summer and we think we have found the large nest:

Back home, this rather ramshackle bowl of bulbs is what is left of the forced hyacinths, especially prepared so that they flowered at Christmas. They are well past their best and have now gone outside to die back before being planted out into the garden in the autumn:

In accordance with instructions, I planted the bulbs into the bowl in early September and left them outside until the beginning of December, at which point they came into the warmth of the house. During this sojourn outside, though, a jay must have buried a walnut in there and this started to grow as soon as the bowl was brought inside.

It was a bumper year for our neighbours’ walnut tree and we saw both crows and magpies making the most of the bonanza:

We only saw jays with acorns, however:

But it is only the jays that will bury nuts away in the soil to feed themselves through the winter.

I extracted the fledgling walnut tree from the pot of hyacinths….

…and put it in its own deep pot to plant out once it has matured a bit more.

There has been a lot of tawny owl activity in the meadows of late. One night this one was on a perch…

…and this photo was taken shortly afterwards. What is going on?

The obvious explanation is that the bird was defecating – but surely that would have been a fast expulsion and so why isn’t it blurry? This remains a bit of a question mark for me.

It is fox mating season, when the males start shadowing the vixens to claim them for themselves and I am seeing pairs of foxes on cameras throughout the meadows. In the photo below, there is also a very brightly lit ship out to sea in the top right hand corner:

It is The Patricia, who anchored alongside us one night this week. Operated by Trinity House, she maintains the buoys and lightship that guard the notorious Goodwin Sands just offshore from the meadows. I have covered the Goodwin Sands in more detail in this previous post: https://walmermeadows.co.uk/2024/05/12/walking-on-the-goodwins/

We last saw her back in November working on the Mew Stone buoys in South Devon when we were on holiday there. Now happily on the other side of midwinter, it feels very right that we are both safely back in Kent.

I think that there’s a lot to like about January. The days are already noticeably getting longer and the brand new year, full of promise, is just beginning. Snowdrops are such elegant harbingers of spring and are now poking their heads up through the soil, guaranteed to lift one’s spirits on a dull winter’s day.

It is also the month when we pay our first visit of the year to Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey. We were there with our son Jonty and daughter-in-law Ellie this week, staying for the first time in the two new cabins overlooking the marsh:

We have been regularly visiting this 3,300 acre marshland which was once farmed but is now a nature reserve of international importance. Large flocks of waders and wildfowl spend the winter there and the short-eared owls and marsh harrier roost are big attractions at this time of year.

Unfortunately a strong and bitter northerly wind got up soon after we arrived, but at least it was dry.

There is a table of interesting nature finds in the cow byre. Some teeny weeny nests here..

…and some grass snake skins:

There are about seven pairs of barn owls that are resident at Elmley and between them in 2024 they raised 40 owlets. However, 2025 was presumably a bad vole year and not a single barn owl chick successfully fledged on the reserve. Towards dusk we went on a guided nature tour where we saw some of Elmley’s barn owls:

A veritable herd of coots was grazing the grasses:

Several thousand lapwing are overwintering on the reserve and they have already started displaying. But courtship was definitely not on the mind of this lapwing below, as it stoically stood with its back to the wind:

A sweet little house sparrow:

It was an exceptional berry year in 2025 and the hawthorn trees on the reserve were still red with uneaten haws even now in the middle of January:

In the previous two winters, twenty to thirty short-eared owls have roosted on the ground in a scrubby area by the car park. Some of these were owls that had fledged in the Arctic where there is no darkness at all in the summer and the birds are therefore accustomed to being out in the daylight. They were delighting visitors by appearing during the afternoon.

This year, however, very few short-eared owls have arrived into the UK to spend the winter and it is thought that there are only a maximum of seven owls in the field by the car park. As well as that, they don’t seem to be Arctic-fledged birds and are generally not appearing until it is dark.

As we finished our dusk tour, it was very nearly dark and we did see two short-eared owls fly out over our heads and away.

Over the course of the day we had actually built up a reasonable tally of bird species, but the views of them weren’t terribly good in poor light and strong winds.

The next morning the weather had improved significantly and we even managed an al fresco breakfast whilst watching three marsh harriers scour the marshes.

Dave and I had to leave soon after breakfast but Jonty and Ellie stayed on and walked down to the hides. When they returned to the car park, the nature guide showed them a short-eared owl that was sitting on a grass tussock by the car park and a barn owl that was flying over, so they were very pleased with that.

Elmley doesn’t really have enough trees for tawny owls. The meadows don’t have many trees either but there has been a lot of tawny activity here this week, with owls on the perches most nights:

There has also been a most unwelcome visitor:

One afternoon we were very surprised to see an adult slow worm lying out in the open on the path:

Cold blooded slow worms need to hibernate over the winter because there is not enough heat to warm their blood. This animal was alive but extremely torpid and we suppose it had been plucked out from its hibernation by a corvid. It had also just lost the end of its tail which is probably how it escaped its predator’s clutches.

Our daughter Lizzie and her partner Sheff have just returned from two weeks in Japan.

This is a forest of mōsō bamboo, Phyllostachys edulis, in Arashiyama. This giant timber bamboo is native to China and Taiwan but is now widely found in Japan. It can reach heights of up to 28m and grows as much as 119 cm in twenty-four hours. Bamboo torture and execution was reportedly used in Japan in the Second World War where a bamboo shoot from a fast-growing species such as this grows through the body of a victim who was tied over it. Such claims lack reliable evidence however.

This information board was showing what fish were to be found in a lake that they visited:

I don’t know what any of these species are but there do seem to be rather a lot of them.

And finally for this brief foray into Japanese nature-related things, Lizzie became obsessed with Hokkaido milk whilst she was there. The Hokkaido climate and lush pastures are ideal for dairy farming and the area produces over 60% of the country’s milk, which is rich and creamy and with a slightly higher fat content than is normal:

She enjoyed it so much and is sad to discover that this milk is not available in the UK.

They seem to have had a marvellous time in Japan but now they are home and they too can start spotting things to be positive about in a British January.